Meet NCDD Board Member Joshua Barr: Building Bridges Through Dialogue, Law, and Film

Meet Joshua Barr, an Emmy- and nationally award-winning filmmaker, civil rights attorney, and policy strategist based in the Greater Asheville area. Joshua’s career spans civil rights enforcement, municipal government, documentary filmmaking, and organizational consulting, all grounded in a commitment to using dialogue to bridge differences and create meaningful change. From leading community dialogue initiatives that informed new city policies to creating the award-winning documentary Breaking Bread, Building Bridges, Joshua has demonstrated how structured, face-to-face engagement can help communities move beyond division and toward common ground. Today, through Raising The Barr, LLC, he helps organizations build more inclusive and equitable policies and practices. As an NCDD board member, Joshua brings a unique ability to translate dialogue and deliberation into practical community action, policy change, and storytelling.

---

---

Joshua Barr, an Emmy- and national award-winning filmmaker, civil rights attorney, and policy strategist based in the Greater Asheville area, serves on the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) Board of Directors. His career spans civil rights enforcement, municipal government, documentary filmmaking, and organizational consulting, united by a consistent focus on using structured dialogue to help communities move through division toward concrete, lasting change.

Barr's professional path began in civil rights enforcement, first with the South Carolina Human Affairs Commission, where he helped identify more than 60 probable cause discrimination violations in 2015, the highest number recorded in the state's history at that time. He went on to serve as director of the Des Moines Civil & Human Rights Commission, where he increased the number of discrimination complaints filed by 170% and probable cause findings by 500%. Among his proudest achievements in that role was Bridging the Gap, an initiative in which the Commission conducted community dialogues across Des Moines to identify barriers to opportunity and safety. That work directly informed nearly 20 new city policies aimed at improving relationships between residents and government and helping people move up the socioeconomic ladder, work that earned Barr recognition as the 2019 Public Servant of the Year by the Des Moines Neighborhood Associations and the 2020 Greater Des Moines MLK Make-A-Difference Award.

In 2020, Barr expanded his approach to bridge-building into documentary film with Breaking Bread, Building Bridges, which he created, directed, and executive produced. The project paired 34 strangers based on their differences and followed them through a series of shared meals over several months, examining whether structured, face-to-face engagement could help people move past division to find common ground. The documentary won the Governor's Emmy Award from the Upper Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and Barr has described the project as one of his proudest accomplishments, dedicating it to those doing the difficult work of pursuing socioeconomic justice in the face of resistance. That same year, Barr was named to the Traeger Award's list of the nation's top 100 local government influencers, recognition tied in part to his widely shared article outlining more than 50 concrete action steps communities can take to address racism at the local level.

Barr now leads Raising The Barr, LLC, his own consulting practice, where he trains organizations across sectors on building inclusive, equitable policies and practices. His recent work has extended this focus into systems-level thinking about youth outcomes, including a 2025 workshop in Des Moines examining how zoning, school quality, and social capital shape children's life trajectories, reframing conversations about disadvantage away from individual blame and toward the systemic conditions that produce it. Barr has also continued to speak nationally on civic engagement and human rights, including addressing human rights offices across the country on sustaining oneself through unpredictable times.

What distinguishes Barr's contribution to NCDD's board is his demonstrated ability to translate dialogue and deliberation principles across strikingly different formats, from municipal policy reform to nationally recognized documentary storytelling to organizational training. His career reflects a through-line the dialogue and deliberation field prizes but rarely sees executed across so many mediums at once: the conviction that bringing people with real differences into direct, structured contact with one another produces change that argument alone cannot.